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A comment on The early history of HP calculators. Parent comment

Re:The early history of HP calculators by CamperBob2 on Sunday September 10, 2017 @02:54PM (#15213663)
The magic is the automatic saving of subexpressions on a stack. Once you got the hang of it, you would never want to go back to an infix calculator.

Of course, you're comparing the HP41C to bad infix calculators, early ones that didn't support algebraic order of operations or explicit parentheses.

It's worth remembering that postfix calculators exist not because they were ever the right thing to do, but because they were easier to implement with limited computing power. Forcing the user to keep track of the stack context was a clever hack on HP's part, but is no longer necessary or justifiable. And that's why you don't see many new postfix calculators these days.

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Re:The early history of HP calculators by waynecochran on Sunday September 10, 2017 @10:39PM (#15215520)
I'll still beat anyone w an infix calc.
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Re:The early history of HP calculators by CamperBob2 on Monday September 11, 2017 @03:07AM (#15216599)
It would make a good demo to point to on YouTube when these debates come up, certainly.

Closest thing I can recall was the contest that pitted a texting teenager against an experienced ham radio operator with a telegraph key...

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